USB is a protocol and a physical layer. In theory you could send layer-2 USB over Ethernet. The software in the Pre is sending back data over a transmission link (this case USB). Is this any different than samba sending packets back to a Windows machine? If the physical link between an iPod and iTunes were an Ethernet link would it change anything? What if Windows decided to double check the SMB protocol number with the host string and refuse to talk to the remote machine because the string didn’t match one Microsoft approved of? The samba guys would have just changed samba to match what Windows was looking for.

Palm is not calling the Pre an iPod. They’re calling it a Pre. The Pre also has a mode that sends back a hex code that matches one that iTunes is looking for. Initially this was only the device ID hex code. Now it’s the vendor and the device ID (a 5 minute fix). Why? Because the iTunes “protocol” demands it.

This is the simple way. A very elegant hack that ensures maximum compatibility since Apple is less likely to radically change the firmware on older devices. The solution would have never had any issues. It is Apple that is moving the target. Why? Well, they want to protect their iPod market. It is a business isn’t it? Let’s not think that it is really about user experience.

Oh… and another reason is rivalry since the Palm guys used to work at Apple. Again, not a real reason, just kids being kids. This will keep up because the “kids” at Palm and Apple are having fun with this.

The copyright and trademarks on the iPod would probably say they’re more than just a storage device. Hell I bet if I were to take a USB stick with a speaker on it and call it a Zune, MS would be calling me with their lawyers.

If it were much simpler for them to do it this way then why are they having so many problems now? If they had just done it the way they were supposed to in the first place they wouldn’t be going through all this now would they?

Dude your comparisons are in a different realm and your logic makes no sense. Do you even know how many people are laughing at you right now?

They weren’t spoofing their company ID initially. They were still saying it was a Palm… a iPod from Palm.

iPods are just USB storage devices! The Pre didn’t hack INTO anything. It just sits there and lets iTunes copy over the files. The work Palm had to do was write an embedded iPod DB reader. The nice thing about this is that those DB files are well documented and they haven’t changed within a product release. This gave Palm a stable environment in which to read the files. It is really a pretty darn good solution. It was much simpler for Palm to write an interface to something that rarely changes (device DB files) than to write a desktop app that can break in all sorts of ways (new OS releases, iTunes releases, people moving files around, etc).

People hack around with iTunes all the time. People hack around with their iPods all the time. Apple certainly didn’t intend for people to mess with the DB files on the iPods, but you can find quite a few apps that do just that. No API, no iTunes, and no license, they just access the files directly over the USB mass storage driver.

This is no different that MacOS using samba libraries so it can access Windows network shares. Samba was built before any documentation of SMB. They reversed engineered the protocol. No API, just on the wire protocol. The samba guys know the protocol better than MS. Are you saying that MacOS should never have shipped with samba libraries?

it sounds as if you think Apple is preventing it from connecting to their OS. That’s not the case.. they’re only preventing them from connecting to iTunes. iTunes was developed to be the syncing software for iPods. What would you say if apple were spoofing their ID and pretending to be a BlackBerry so they could use the BlackBerry desktop software to sync instead of making their own sync software?

Palm is still more than welcome to develop their own software to sync with a Mac and even still welcome to use the open API provided to access iTunes data. Hell if they wanted, they could even just mount themselves as a hard drive on a mac and let the user drag their music onto the device.

They’re just not allowed to lie about what they are and “hack” into iTunes to get out of doing their own work. Do you even want to do business with a company who has to hack or spoof to be able to sync? You would imagine it wouldn’t be all that much for palm to make their own sync application.

If Apple didn’t check for the use of the Vendor ID, Palm would have been happy only to spoof the Device ID so that you could always find out that the device was really a Palm. Once Apple blocked that, Palm will just continue down the road of making the device more and more a clone of the iPod. I suspect that Apple is spending much more time on their side breaking the Pre than Palm is fixing it.

your logic is a bit skewed considering the iPod still uses iTunes on a windows pc. That and the fact that the pre has nothing to do with Microsoft anyway.